Everything begins with sand. Pure silicon is extracted, melted at 1,414°C, and grown into a single perfect crystal ingot. This ingot is sliced into wafers thinner than a human hair. Then, using Extreme Ultraviolet lithography — light with a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers — we burn billions of transistors into the wafer. Each transistor is smaller than a virus. A single modern chip contains more transistors than there are stars in the Milky Way.